Tanien - Part 1

Background

(Warning! Bad science ahead.)
In ancient times the world was fully peopled by two great races; the Koan and the Sidhe. The Koan were masters of biology and the Sidhe of energy. Their civilization is said to straddle worlds. Having survived the possible ecological destruction of the planet due to unwise use of their technology, they had reached an organic level of science that culminated in the Gaia Project. The Sidhe created a vast network of non-cabled energy that also acted as lines of communication connected by nodes throughout the planet's surface. Using the Koan's direction, this grid became the lifeblood for a living, self renewing planet that "breathed" in the ambient energy of the universe. All living things on the planet were tied into this grid.

Unknown to the Sidhe, the Koan designed the grid so that they could take the energy into themselves, forcibly changing themselves into a race that had no need for tools or science but lived upon raw power - dragons. They took over as seemingly immortal rulers, using the Sidhe and unchanged Koan as slaves. However the Sidhe weren't without resources and used their knowledge of the Gaia Project to have the planet attack itself so as to cause an ice age. The dragons, who needed much warmer temperatures, fell into hibernation and were buried in the ice. The survivors found themselves with a decimated world.

The Koan weren't the only ones seeking immortality via the Gaia Project, though. The Grid also acted as an information and communications medium. The Sidhe had made it such that upon death any sufficiently sentient being would be uploaded for a sort of eternal rest. What was meant to be simple storage eventually changed into an active, virtual afterlife. The conflicts that ended in life began to continue on after death - there was a great deal of damage done to the data stores in this way. Additionally, certain individuals found themselves with administrator type permissions. Effectively they became gods of the afterlife.

These new "gods" could influence the energies of the Grid and found they now had power in the real world. Combined with promises of good treatment in the afterlife these gods began accumulating followers and even religious hierarchies. Most notably a draconic god who had regretted his actions in life and did what he could for the few Koan that survived around the equator. Unfortunately many gods were not so kind and their followers existed primarily to bolster their own power.

There were very few sidhe who remembered the old days, but there were enough. They saw that their decedents were becoming enslaved by the priest-kings and their gods. Whatever hope they might have had for rekindling the flame of the Sidhe would disappear. With the help of sympathetic gods and what knowledge was left in the Grid, the remaining Sidhe engineered a final holocaust - the ice age worsened, civilizations collapsed and the Grid itself was wiped.

The legacy remaining was still substantial, however. The descendants of the Koan (the Shazak and Cayma) and the Sidhe (the Elves and Trolls) were now equal in numbers and forced to coexist in order to survive. The Gaia Project still existed but was now devoid of information. It still acted as an afterlife and gods were still created but with no programmed knowledge of how to use the Grid their power was limited and had to be relearned. With all advanced technology lost this manipulation of the grid by the living and the dead became arcane and divine magics that helped shape society but didn't totally dominate it. In addition, pockets of knowledge are still hidden about and some gods have made use of it. Finally, the ice age is receding and the ruins of the past are being uncovered - as are the sleeping dragons.